What is the Scratch Profile Creator?

It creates a Scratch project that shows off all of the projects that you've worked on and shared in Scratch.

Simply enter the name of your Scratch profile into the box and tap the enter key. It will gather together the thumbnails of all of your Scratch projects along with any hashtags that you've added to the project descriptions or notes and credits sections of each project.

Note that this works best if you add some hashtags (e.g. #games, #art, #animations, #description(This is a description of this game), #favourites, etc.) to your project descriptions but you can still test it out without doing that.

What is this preview for?

You use the preview to see what your custom profile project is going to look like. Every time you customise a part of the project you can re-check the preview to see what difference it has made!

Why should I save it?

When you're happy with the preview you can save the project to your computer.

It saves the project as a file called profile.sb3. You can then go into Scratch, create a new project and tap the "File" option followed by "Load from your computer" to add this to your Scratch projects.

You can use it as the featured project on your profile page so that other Scratchers can easily look through all of your projects, selecting to look at just games, art, or all of them if you've set up the appropriate hashtags.

How can I customise the project?

There are several ways to make the profile project especially unique to yourself. These fall under the categories of visual, audio and projects/hashtags.

The Visual tab lets you modify the title screen of the project and/or the size of thumbnails used within the project itself. A title screen must be a PNG file with a size of 480x360 pixels..

The Audio tab allows you to change the background music used. Any MP3 file can be used for this.

Hashtags are where you can really make the project your own. The profile will allow you to use hashtags that you've used in your project descriptions (or notes and credits sections) to sort through your projects. If you've tagged all of your games with #games and all of your animations with #animations then you will be able to easily switch between those types of projects. There are also a couple of hashtags with special uses - #description(.....) lets you add a description for each project and #noindex allows you to completely ignore a project. You can enable/disable the hashtags using either the Projects aor Hashtags tabs. You can have a maximum of 15 unique hashtags in use.

If a project has no accompanying hashtags enabled then it will be highlighted in red as the project will not be visible in the profile.

Don't forget that you can preview the project at any time while customising it.

What is the Scratch Profile Creator?

This is a tool that creates a Scratch project to display all of your own Scratch projects in one place! It's better than the standard display offered in a Scratch profile as people can sort your projects by category - games, animations, tools, stories or anything else you choose to use. This means that other Scratchers are more likely to find projects they want to look at.

How do I use it?

You create the Scratch project by simply entering your profile name and tapping the enter key! After that you can tap the save button to download the Scratch project to your computer.

How do I get the downloaded project into Scratch?

When logged into Scratch, create a new (empty) project, tap the File button and select the Load From Computer option.

Previews

You can look at a preview of the profile project whenever you want by tapping the preview area. This is especially useful when you're customising it and want to see how it's going to look.

Customisation options

You can add your own title page (project thumbnail) to the project or use the default one that it comes with. If you're going to use your own then make sure it's a PNG file with a size of 480x360 pixels.

The size of the small thumbnails used within the project can easily be altered. You may prefer to have fewer but larger thumbnails being displayed or maybe you'd rather have lots of smaller thumbnails on the screen at once.

If you don't want the default music playing in the background then you can add your own MP3 file.

Hashtags

Now, this is where you can really take control of the project and this is what allows people to look through your projects by category. By default, this tool gives every project a #all hashtag so that it works even if you don't have any of your own hashtags added. What makes it far better is if you add your own hashtags to your projects. You can do this in the instructions panel or in the notes/credits panel. For example, you could add #games to all of your games or #animations to all of your animations. If you have an animation that is also a game you could add both hashtags to it! Use your imagination and add categories that you think people will find useful when looking through your projects.

It's quite straightforward really but it's probably easiest to see an example of how they actually work. If you enter RokCoder into the profile box then you can look at the Hashtags tab to see how I've used them for my own projects. You can also look at a preview to see how they work in the actual profile project.

If you look at the Projects tab you'll see a list of all of your shared projects along with any hashtags that they have in their descriptions. Likewise, if you look at the Hashtags tab you'll see a list of all of the hashtags used in all of your projects in order of frequency. From either of these tabs you can choose which hashtags will be used in your project for search categories. If you tap a green hashtag then it becomes grey and vice versa. Green hashtags are the ones that will be used in your Profile project.

Note that you have a limit of fifteen hashtags that you can use. If it won't let you turn a grey hashtag into a green one then you probably already have fifteen selected hashtags and may need to deselect one first.

Special Hashtags

There are a few hashtags that have special meaning for this tool. #noindex tells this tool that you don't want that specific project to be shown. #description(Add your description inside the brackets) tells the tool what description you want to use to describe each project.

Project Tab

It's always worth having a quick look at this tab before saving your project. If any of your projects don't have descriptions (#description(text)) or don't have any selected hashtags then you'll be able to identify those very quickly from this screen. If a project has no selected hashtags then you won't be able to view it from your profile project.